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Astronomers have identified a group of ultrashort radio bursts that may have come from an unknown source outside the Milky Way Galaxy, research suggests. The astronomers believe the radio bursts originated from a magnetar -- a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field -- but are unsure of its location. Further study may reveal the number of baryons, which are protons and neutrons, between galaxies.

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The results of a study released last week saying fast radio bursts could be traced back to the collision of neutron stars has been called into question by scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The first team, led by Jodrell Bank Observatory's Evan Keane, said in Nature that they tracked the mysterious bursts to a galaxy's "afterglow," suggesting the cosmic collision. However, Harvard-Smithsonian's Peter Williams and colleagues viewed the galaxy last weekend and observed it glowing again, which they say wouldn't happen if there had been a collision of stars.

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a small dwarf galaxy about 7 million light-years away from the Milky Way's cluster of galaxies. KKs3 is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy with stars that have one ten-thousandth of the Milky Way's mass, according to a description published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, known as BOSS, has measured the distances between galaxies within 1% accuracy, it was announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house," said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist David Schlegel, principal investigator of BOSS. His team used baryon acoustic oscillations as a ruler to measure distances between galaxies.

Astronomers have found that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy has a strong magnetic field by analyzing a rare neutron star orbiting it. Dutch scientists are using the star, a rare type of pulsar called a magnetar, as a probe to help them learn more about black holes and to test Einstein's theory of relativity.

Astronomers have discovered a magnetar near the massive black hole known as Sagittarius A* in the center of the galaxy. By studying the spin of the magnetar -- a highly magnetized type of pulsar -- scientists hope to test predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity. "There's huge interest in finding pulsars around supermassive black holes, and this is the first example. There's a lot we can learn from this," said Geoffrey Bower, a radioastronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.